Ruby Gentry

Equal parts swampland noir and southern-fried melodrama, Ruby Gentry is a pulpy mess of lurid proportions that buckles under the miscasting of the two leads. Jennifer Jones basically gives another version of the same performances she gave in Duel in the Sun and Gone to Earth, and can’t quite make her Ruby stand out enough from those two indelible creations. Charlton Heston is typically wooden, generates no chemistry with Jones, and doesn’t display any charm or magnetic sexuality that would indicate why Ruby is so erotically fixated upon him. They’re not helped by a script that is sacked with an unnecessary narration, a bevy of clichés and a pervading sense of predictability, and a failure to do more than superficial gestures towards the characters and their motivations. The only things that make Ruby Gentry tolerable are the tragic climax in the misty swamps and Karl Malden’s layered performance that gives this material more poetry than its worth.